I'd settle for decent shelf space at the local book stores.

As I see it, sci-fi get relegated to the bottom shelf on a hidden corner of the store, while esoterism, alternative medicines crap, and the latest celebrity endorsed diet gets to the front window.

I don't need huge total volume, I just want blisteringly fast for shortish periods.

In other words, porn.

Most of Google's business model is based on Internet-based client-server interaction. The faster people's connections are, the better their core products work.

Since the state of high-speed internet in the US today is basically an abusive oligopoly, Google has a huge interest in changing that market for the better.

If that's the case, it's a shit design -- it should never allow such a differential between "current actual" and "current goal" speeds. If you keep mashing the button after the differential hits, say, 5mph, it should ignore further presses until it's back in range.

Sounds like you need this. I have one a vendor gave me a few years back, and it's great.

> At some point along that line, it no longer becomes immoral to remain in business The point where that occurs is where your actions and decisions no longer have a significant impact. Microsoft, and your wagon makers, are both far from that point. It's entirely within the wagon maker's power to refuse to fill that order for 1,000 new wagons to the Nazi Party. If the wagons are making it to the Party through aftermarket back channels, THAT's where the wagon maker can begin to claim no moral responsibility. That's not where we are, though.

Meh, your little brother's comments are usually more insightful than yours anyway. Zing!

it does, and you don't need to restart anything.

the thing is, if you already accessed the url, the result for the dns query (or hosts file) is cached and it doesn't need to do the query again.. try it with a url you never accessed before.

Wow. Novell just did something that

a) They're good at.

b) It's hard for the FOSS community to do.

c) Helps the FOSS community a lot.

I think I speak for just about everyone when I give a hearty "Thanks!" to Novell.

Perhaps if slashdotters relied on a software patent as their primary source of income, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of them.

[Sigh] Yes, this is always where the argument gets uncomfortable, because you're forced into a position of attacking someone's current source of income, and that pretty much always makes people unhappy.

You're posting AC and didn't link to the patent, so I assume that you don't want people to know who you are. This is a little unfortunate, since I have to be abstract. However, I can say that, despite reading a number of software patents, I have seen not one idea that I would consider novel enough and intelligent enough in software to warrant a patent -- stuff that wouldn't have been produced without a patent in place and that actually helps mankind. The RSA patent qualifies as a non-trivial, very helpful patent, but the ideas behind RSA were developed without a patent as a driver, more as a personal interest. It is possible, of course, that RSA would not have been publicized in such an event, though, so I'll give RSA a pass. Other than that, though, I've seen a huge flood of bullshit patents. If I go to the USPTO and search for "computer", the hits that come up are a mass of ridiculous, obvious (in the conventional sense, not the legal sense unfortunately used to determine patent validity) patents.

So, I can't see your patent and say "that should really not be a patent". However, I don't understand why, if you have the ability to come up with a new mechanism, you can't simply implement it and make money from that.